Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend

  The old Shadow crouched in the living room, waiting for the turn of wrenches and better weather. Michael stacked exam papers on its seat and cranked up the computer, which shared the desk with greasy tools and unwashed coffee cups. A few taps on the keys and the GradeCalc program came up. In went the scores, GradeCalc churned away for thirty seconds, and out came final distributions, normal curves, standard deviations, and all that other good stuff, most of which he ignored in his grading.

  Two hours later, the final grade sheets with one whole cover page of instructions that would make a computer blink—instructions he didn’t read and hadn’t read for all fifteen years of teaching and apparently didn’t need to read since nobody ever complained—were filled in and signed. He had twenty minutes to drop off the grades before the registrar shut down at four-thirty. Coat on, over to the campus, turn in the grades.

  Done. Free, for a month. Fifteen years of doing this, another twenty to go unless the dean could prove professional incompetence, which he couldn’t, or charged Michael with moral turpitude, which he wouldn’t, because the entire university except for the accounting department would be out on its ear if those standards were enforced. Stay away from the coeds in your classes—that was the main rule for survival, put down with no punches pulled by the former dean, an old guy who had hired Michael fresh out of graduate school. Way before sexual harassment started flashing in the front of everyone’s mind, the old dean had a famous lecture he gave to young faculty members, the males, that is. The essence of it went something like this:

  Gentlemen, I know you’re all adults, but let me remind you about a few matters. A lot of these young women are traditional mid-western girls, and they expect to take you home to meet Mother and Father on the weekend following bedroom activity, with wedding announcements to be mailed soon after. Forget about the air of sophistication they seem to exude. The coeds are big trouble, I mean big trouble. The undergraduate males are a bunch of donkeys, mostly, and you’re going to look sleek and worldly to the coeds, and they’re going to look pretty good to you. Some of them will sit in the front row in short skirts with paradise twinkling at you. You’ll have plenty of opportunities for good times between the sheets— it’s a goddamn cafeteria out there—but forget it, at least until they’re no longer in any of your classes, and I would strongly recommend you stay away from them altogether. I have problems enough without sobbing young women sitting in my office and claiming you discriminated against them in your grading because of some kind of confusion involving preconjugal folderol. In other words, cause me that kind of grief and I’ll kick your butts down the academic mountain and see you never work in this business again.

  It was a lecture on how to avoid trouble, not develop sensitivity toward females. Michael was sure the latter issue never crossed the old dean’s mind, given the faculty was 99 percent male.

  Having said that much, the dean told them the famous story that had been part of the university saga for twenty-five years. Seems one of the Russian teachers was in his office when a coed came in to see him. He motioned for her to sit down and said he’d be with her in a moment, all the while intently finishing some piece of work he had on his desk. When he looked up, she was standing there in the buff with the office door shut. The issues were a little complicated, but the nub of it was this: Give me a passing grade or I’ll scream.

  You want cool under pressure? You want big cojones? The professor of Russian had them both, in spades. He could have been a neurosurgeon or a space commando. He got up, threw open the door, and walked forthwith into the hall, where he pointed in at the young woman and shouted in heavily accented English, “Get out of my office. Now!” Passersby were treated to a reasonably decent glimpse of a reasonably good, young female body (that’s part of the saga, anyway, though Michael noticed that as the story was carried forward and repeated, her physical attributes approached Amazonian proportions, her body filling out and improving with age, as it were).

  He’d always wondered just what lesson should be drawn from the tale, since it never had been clear whether or not the young woman and the Russian had anything going on the side. But, having told it, the dean shooed the junior faculty out of his office and left them with the following two guidelines for not letting their moral turpitude drift: Keep your pants zipped and your office door open.

  About two-thirds of those receiving the lecture followed the dean’s advice. The other one-third cut a swath like a combine through the waving fields of coed grain and apparently suffered little for it, partly because those peering out from glass houses have no interest in chucking accusatory rocks at others. Michael left the coeds alone, simply because he didn’t find them attractive. Too young, too naive, and what the hell do you say to them in the morning? “Who do you have for Western civ?” C’mon.

  So the grades were in, and Michael was unfettered until January 17, when he’d do it all over again. Down the halls of the administration building he went, admiring the waxed oak floors, inhaling the vapors of incompetent power radiating from the walls and oozing from under darkened doors like smoke from a burning village where truth and beauty had once been found. The temporary lightness he’d felt after finishing a good set of exams was dissipating as he thought about Jellie Braden. He was getting angry at her for going to England, for just bloody taking off and leaving him there to mourn her absence.

  Irrational? Of course it was irrational. He had no right to anything other than what he already had when it came to her, which was nothing. She’s sitting in Kennedy now, he thought, waiting for TWA to take her lovely body and equally lovely soul onto nine months of new experiences and different people. Maybe she was right, maybe her absence would do it, get him cooled off and refocused on something other than her.

  Then he started to waffle: “Come back, come back, Jellie Braden. I need to look at you one more time, just one. I want to continue the conversation we started. I want to hear more of how you feel about me and for us to get the air cleared.” But the mail doesn’t come on Sundays, and James Lee Braden HI had taken his wife on to foreign pleasures, leaving Michael Tillman foundering in his wake.

  As he passed by the provost’s office, a janitor had the door propped open while emptying wastebaskets. Michael glanced inside. Clarice Berenson, the provost’s secretary, stared at a computer screen. The office was empty except for her.

  They went back a ways, Clarice and Michael. She’d come home to Cedar Bend from New York when her gynecologist husband dumped her for a psychiatric nurse. After the bad scene with her former husband she had a negative attitude toward men overall. But she and Michael got together occasionally, and they flew pretty close to the sun when they were rolling.

  Clarice was into serious opera and worked part-time on an M.A. in Spanish, and that along with her job kept her busy. But now and then she liked to shake it real hard. That’s where Michael came in, and their schedules seemed to work in perfect sync when it came to getting crazy.

  Clarice looked up, grinning. “Well, it’s the campus rebel with no apparent cause. How you doin’, Michael?”

  “Not bad. Just turned in my grades and resting on my oars. How about you, Clarice?”

  “Since the provost-sir flew off to Los Angeles about two hours ago, things have picked up quite a bit. I’m just shutting down. Want to have a beer?”

  “Better than that, how about beer and dinner?”

  “Now you’re talking, Michael. We could even take it up another level and go jump around at Beano’s tonight. Bobby’s Blues Band is playing there, starting at nine. It’ll be end-of-the-semester nuts, but that suits me just fine.”

  “You’re on. But first I need to clean up a bit. Say, about seven? Go down to Rossetti’s for pasta, then over to Beano’s for the fun?”

  “Perfect. I’ll pick you up, I think it’s my turn to drive.”

  “Okay, see you in a little while.”

  Michael started drinking beer when he got home. Sat on the Shadow with a Beck’s dark in his han
d and John Coltrane on the tape deck. Malachi stood up and put his paws on Michael’s leg. He rubbed Malachi’s ears while the music played, thinking about Jellie Bra-den flying through the darkness away from him. But those kinds of thoughts weren’t fair to Clarice, he decided, and two more beers got him away from his loneliness and into the evening… kind of.

  Clarice was not Jellie Braden when it came to looks. On the other hand, that was also a little unfair, since to Michael’s way of thinking nobody compared with Jellie along that dimension. But Clarice had that same indefinable quality we lump under “class,” and she was more than just presentable. And, just as important, she was not on her way to London.

  Clarice knocked on his door at ten to seven while he was pulling on a white cotton turtleneck that worked pretty well with faded jeans. She came in and got a beer from the fridge. He padded around barefoot, looking for a clean pair of boot socks. When he carried his boots out to the living room, Clarice was perched on the Shadow, wearing a maize-colored sweater and forest green corduroys tapering down just above her dainty tassel loafers.

  “Lookin’ good, Clarice, real good.” He said it and he meant it, with three bottles of beer propelling the warmth of the compliment even further than he might have taken it otherwise.

  “Thank you, Professor Tillman. How’s the winter repair job on the bike coming along? I see you have the chain off and hanging over the back of a chair.”

  “Aw, the old guy is in need of constant attention these days. Parts are getting just about impossible to find, but the mail-order catalogs keep him going. If I have to, I’ll start running off my own parts at a machine shop somewhere. He and I are together for life.”

  “Well, I’m glad somebody is.” The divorce still hurt, Clarice never tried to pretend otherwise around him. “Any big trips planned for the summer?” She tilted back her dark blond head, took a drink of beer, and gave him a lickerish grin. They both knew what was coming down before the night was over.

  “Thought I might ride up along Lake Superior. I haven’t been there for a while. It’s kind of pretty and not too crowded if you stay away from the big holidays. Wanna go with me?” He wasn’t sure why he made the offer. He usually preferred traveling alone, but he was feeling deserted and left behind, and Clarice was looking especially good that night. He liked Clarice a lot.

  She knew his travel habits and looked surprised, little quizzical smile on her face. “Maybe… when are you going?”

  “I can go just about anytime, since I don’t teach summer school anymore. If you’re interested, we can work it out to your schedule. Ready to rumble?”

  The spaghetti was good. They took their time over dinner, drinking a bottle of wine and talking before plunging into the maelstrom that was Beano’s around nine-thirty. Bobby had the Blues Band cooking: “Put on your high-heeled sneakers, Mama, and your wiglet on your head/Put on your high-heeled…” Drummer, lead guitar, bass, Bobby singing and playing harmonica. And, of course, Molly Never (that’s what she claims her parents named her) absolutely screaming on electric violin, legs apart, black heels and black stockings, black miniskirt, purple blouse. She looked like a funky Peter Pan who had been around the darker side of life. The band hit 115 decibels and headed up from there.

  Bobby’d had this same band for twelve years, and they operated with a hard, disciplined precision. He shouted over the microphone, “Here’s a song made famous by three black girls from Memphis, now to be sung by three white boys from small towns in the Midwest. That’s why you pay Beano’s exorbitant cover charge, to hear that kind of shit, right?” The crowd roared.

  Clarice and Michael stood off to the side, waiting for a table to open up, which could take hours. She was screaming at him, him at her, as they tried to talk over the searing lead guitar of one Doppler Donovan, who wore a cowboy hat on his head and military-issue, jungle-style combat boots on his feet. Bobby had gone into a honky version of a Chuck Berry skip as he slid into his harp solo, amplifier cord looking as if it were coming out of his mouth where he held a small microphone against the harmonica.

  Michael looked over at the booth where he and Jellie had sat a week ago. It was occupied now by two couples engaged in a pairwise beer-chugging contest. Her words floated through the smoke and the noise of Beano’s: “There’s something else going on between us, isn’t there, Michael?”

  Clarice slipped her arm around his waist and hugged him, bouncing up and down to the beat. She wanted to dance, and she’d eventually get him out there. But Michael wasn’t comfortable on dance floors, never had been, so he was waiting for the second round of beer drinking to override the spaghetti and give him courage.

  A student staggered up, towing a platinum blonde wearing greased-on jeans and a black leather jacket. Ghastly beer breath washed Michael’s cheeks as the student shouted over the music, “Great class, Dr. Tillman, absolutely great. How’d I do?”

  Michael didn’t post grades, particularly in Beano’s. But what the hell, beer breath had done all right, and it was party time. He held up one of Beano’s custom napkins and pointed to the B on it, grinning.

  The student threw both arms over his head in joy and spun back onto the dance floor, where he went into a ponylike boogaloo, pawing the air. Five minutes later he sent the waitress over with two draws for Michael and Clarice. It was semester’s end, and they were all burying the dead and praising the living, so the atmosphere was celebrative, sort of like a New Orleans funeral at ten thousand watts. Doppler Don-ovan led the band into something called the “Drake Neighborhood Slide,” and Clarice pulled Michael out on the dance floor.

  The evening closed as he knew it would—warm, libidinous, and thoroughly satisfying. He and Clarice were good in bed together, and before it was over she was kneeling on the bed, palms and breasts and face pasted against the wall, with him behind her licking the perspiration off her shoulders and doing several other things that pleased her greatly, as she constantly and fervently emphasized while all of this was under way: “Yes, Michael… goddamnit, yes, yes, yes!”

  Seven

  Jellie from a distance. The ambiguity of those months she was in England was hard on him. His running shoes slushed along the streets of Cedar Bend, and ice clung to his hair where it stuck out beneath his blue stocking cap. The faculty and students were suspended in a climatic purgatory somewhere between the lights of Christmas and the warming of the earth in April. Gray muck draped like a shroud over Bingley Hall, ceiling lights bright and cold. Wind from the Canadian prairies smacked the building’s north side and howled through the corridors when an outside door was opened. Unlike wine, or the coed of legend who removed her duds in a Russian professor’s office, a midwestern winter does not improve with age.

  Thinking almost constantly about Jellie, Michael pushed the students hard and even held an extra three-hour class on a Sunday afternoon, promising them time off for good behavior later in the semester. He knew he’d begin to lose them and himself when the warm came again, so they were getting the hard stuff out of the way early. They hammered onward. By February’s close he was thinking of calling for mass, campuswide psychotherapy to counter the late winter blahs. But they hung on, as ancient sailors in pounding seas clung to the mainmast and with the same faith in better times to come.

  Then over the bare trees fluttered the first sign of hope in the form of colorful travel brochures pinned to hallway bulletin boards. The words and pictures promised sun and sand, tonic and tans, and, somewhat more slyly, fast times amid the palms of Florida or the south Texas coast. The classroom buzz as they waited for the bell ran to snow conditions in Colorado and who was driving which twelve people to South Padre Island in an old Dodge van.

  By that time Michael had frightened the lower 20 percent of the class into filing drop slips. Those remaining were a group of battle-scarred veterans, deserving of a short rest before he bullwhacked them up the slopes of learning toward victory, and maybe graduation. The inevitable questions came: “Professor Tillman, is it all rig
ht if I miss your Thursday class before spring break? A bunch of us are going to Day-tona Beach, and we want to leave Wednesday night.”

  He looked at the nice young woman who asked the question—it was a different one every spring, but they all ran together after a while—and said, “Why do you think I dragged you in here for an extra three hours on a Sunday afternoon? Yes, you may leave early, but get the notes for my dazzling lecture on matrix transposition from someone, because I’m not going to repeat it after you get back.” He grinned at her. “Now get out of my hair and leave me alone. I have serious work to do in saving a world having no interest in being saved.”

  Friday came, beginning of spring break. Gusty March winds late in the month, minivans and station wagons filled with impatient spouses lined up outside the building, motors running, waiting for classes to end. The library was nearly empty, except for graduate students catching up on their work and junior professors slogging their way toward a tenure decision. By the time Michael got out of Bingley at five, the campus was quiet.

  At home he leaned back in his chair and stared at a Polaroid picture of Jellie pinned to a piece of cork-board above his desk. She looked out at him, standing by a stone wall in Ireland, in her hiking clothes, hair tucked under her round tweed hat with the little bill, leather bag over her left shoulder. She’d mailed him a card saying hello and not much else in late January. The photo came a month later, accompanied by a neutral-sounding note in her small, neat handwriting:

  2/21

  Hi, Michael.

  We took a long weekend and came over to Ireland to scout things out for a more extended trip this summer. I hope your spring is going well. Crave our coffee talks and miss you.

  Jellie

  He noticed she didn’t underline “miss” in the way she had said it in Beano’s just before she left. Maybe that was looking too hard for what didn’t exist. Jellie wasn’t coy, and what she said about getting cooled down might be working—for her, at least. For Michael, it wasn’t, and the picture only made matters worse. He sat there and stared at it for hours, thinking and wanting. He just didn’t see how he could go on living his life without Jellie Braden next to him all the time. Five months to go, and she’d be back. He couldn’t wait for her to return and never wanted to see her again, all at the same time. He kept trying to conjure up ways to defend his psyche against the assaults she made on it without even trying, but he failed and sat there waiting for August.